You may select the same topic for both the threat and the opportunity if you believe there are ways for a proactive small business owner to
Deliverable is to write only one page or One-Minute Brief (OMB), analyzing insights from the chapter on Today’s Business Model in The Construction MBA: Practical Approaches to Construction Contracting, with supporting research from two outside sources. Cover threats and opportunities in today’s construction business environment for small businesses.
You may select the same topic for both the threat and the opportunity if you believe there are ways for a proactive small business owner to capitalize on the threat to other firms and turn it into and advantage for their own. For this assignment you should be guided by the textbook chapter, but you must also provide at least two outside resources to support your arguments.
What is an OMB?
These are focused, on-topic, brief write-ups – no more than one page in length – communicating your ideas on a specific topic in a clear, concise, and compelling manner. While the OMB got its name because the reader should only have to spend a minute or so reading it, the length restrictions can actually make them quite challenging to ideate and compose. The format restrictions will train you to communicate your thoughts succinctly. Use your page to apply course learnings, provide analysis, and argue your unique insights.
The purpose of this format is to practice making powerful persuasions quickly, and in writing. I’m sure most of you have some sort of experience either getting or creating lengthy “executive summaries,” only to have them round-filed after the first three or four paragraphs. Make your argument quicker; make it clear, make it concise, and compel me to consider your view.
For a successful OMB, you should assume that the audience has a certain depth of information and experience on the area of your analysis and recommendation. If you ever had to write a 20-page paper in college, you probably learned that a good 15-17 pages could be filled with background information, mostly repeating history and analysis from your research. This then set the stage for a couple of pages of the ‘hard stuff’ where you could argue your own thesis. At work, you can’t afford to waste the time of your audience by giving them that kind of depth for every problem; fortunately, you can assume that whoever your audience is at work (your boss, your employees, your customers), they are well in-tune to the background information that they need in order to understand your point.
For this assignment, you can assume that I have read and fully understand the textbook. If you are tempted to quote even a sentence or two out of the textbook, that is probably too much background and you can delete it and go back to giving me new information and insights that apply themes from the textbook. Your boss doesn’t want to hear a long description of something that they already know, and they don’t always have time for you to give a long summary of an interesting article that you read, even if it applies to this situation in some way. She or he just has a few minutes to hear your analysis and solution to the problem, so use your outside sources to reinforce the specific point you want to make, but don’t waste time summarizing the whole article.
It takes a lot more work and time to be concise, so plan on writing several drafts over the next few days before turning in your final version. You may find that writing a couple of pages is easier to get started, then you can go back and edit out everything that isn’t focused on your main message.
That 20-page research paper you wrote in college was a great way to make your college professor drowsy; an OMB should inspire insight and action. If your OMB makes me feel like standing up, ready to go to work, then you’ll know you’ve written a great OMB.
FORMAT: DO NOT EXCEED 1 PAGE, Calibri 11pt font, 1.15 line spacing, 1” margins. I WILL NOT READ ANYTHING BEYOND THE FIRST PAGE AND WILL GRADE THE ASSIGNMENT ACCORDINGLYand you will lose the points in the assignment rubric related to format. Please use APA format for citations. Note that You May Use an Extra Page at the End for your Source Bibliography.
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